Microarraying and biological sensing are important emerging technologies with huge potential impact on clinical and research medicine. Present methodologies for microarraying and biological sensing are based on fluorescence, radioactive, colorimetry, or surface plasmon resonance assays of molecular recognition chemistry with the former garnering the most attention.
Although these methodologies work, there are problems with each of them. Fluorescence and radioactivity require a special tagging chemistry and thus are time-consuming and cumbersome to use. Additionally, methodologies based on radiation are hard to scale to arrays, and have associated safety and environmental problems. Colorimetry requires chemical amplification when there are large changes in the thickness of the coating and thus is very complicated to adapt to arraying.
The present invention is directed to overcoming these and other deficiencies in the art.